Life in public-shooting era: 'You can't just not go'

Ohio: A bar district where friends gathered for drinks on a warm on Saturday night. Texas: A Walmart stocked with supplies for back-to-school shopping on an August morning. California: A family-focused festival that celebrates garlic, the local cash crop.

Two consecutive summer weekends. Less than seven days. More than 30 fellow human beings gone in moments, in public places exactly like those where huge swaths of the US population go without a second thought.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps no longer. Have we crossed into an era of second, third, even fourth thoughts?

"I don't like to go out, especially without my husband. It's really scary being out by myself," preschool teacher Courtney Grier, 21, said on Sunday outside a grocery store in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where a gunman killed 12 in a city building in late May.

But, Grier says, "You still have to go to the grocery store to get dinner. You can't just not go."

That might be an apt slogan for the United States, circa 2019: You can't just not go.

Civic life, particularly the public portion of it, has been a foundation of US society since the beginnings. That may have ebbed in today's nose-in-your-device world, but events like festivals, going out for the evening and, in particular, shopping remain enduring communal activities. Now those three venues have given US citizens lethal and very public shootings in the space of less than a week.

Add other daily-life institutions that have been visited by mass shootings - houses of worship, movie theaters, malls, a newsroom and, of course, schools - and the question becomes more pressing: Are these loud, sudden events starting to fundamentally change the US in quiet, incremental ways?

The sites where bullets flew and people fell this past week are not simply places where random people gather publicly and informally. More importantly, they're places like the ones where people gather publicly and informally - particularly in the summer, when so many are not as hunkered down by weather and obligation.

The chances of a US being caught up in a public mass shooting remain incredibly rare. Nevertheless, the sometimes toxic cocktail of the events themselves, social media echo chambers and the distorting factors of the 24-hour news cycle can have a great impact.

El Paso's 20, Dayton's nine and Gilroy's three deaths have caused online outpourings around many questions, some more political than others. But variations of these two keep cropping up: Are regular places safe anymore? Should we assume that they are?

There are, loosely, two types of reactions that sometimes overlap. One is to back off some activities or to take more precautions. One is to be defiant. That's the approach that retired Marine Richard Ruiz, a Gilroy native, says he's seen in Gilroy in the week since the garlic festival shooting.

"The thing that has changed in Gilroy is our focus," said Ruiz, 42. "No one is showing signs of being worried or fearful in public. We're emboldened. We want to go out more."

But in Squirrel Hill, the Pittsburgh neighborhood where a shooter killed 11 people at Tree of Life synagogue last fall, a commitment to doing exactly that has helped ensure that civic life remains vibrant. There is little visible change except for the "Stronger than Hate" signs in some shop windows that encourage two things: a return to normal life and a commitment to never forgetting.

Associated Press

(China Daily 08/06/2019 page12)